The Global Music Business as an Information Industry: Reinterpreting Economies of Culture

D Sadler
Additional contact information
D Sadler: Department of Geography, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, England

Environment and Planning A, 1997, vol. 29, issue 11, 1919-1936

Abstract: In this paper it is argued that the music business should be regarded as an activity trading in information. The paper begins with a review of key themes in the conceptualisation of the music industry within the cultural economies tradition. These are the tensions between creativity and commerce and between global and local processes, and the characterisation of the industry in the terms of the flexible specialisation and reflexive accumulation theses. It is then suggested that these debates have downplayed a key characteristic of the contemporary music industry, its involvement with the creation, production, and distribution of information. The emergence of a global music business over the past decade is documented and analysed by means of this framework. Subsequently, two aspects of the integration processes taking place in the music industry are considered in terms of their relationship to the information economy: copyright protection and branding, and competition between producers of information storage and retrieval devices. The paper concludes that interpreting music as an information industry sheds new light on the music business, and points to important questions for further research within the information economy literature.

Date: 1997
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a291919 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:29:y:1997:i:11:p:1919-1936

DOI: 10.1068/a291919

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().